AMD Will Reduce Focus on High-Performance Multi-Core Chips for Servers.

The recent restructuring of Advanced Micro Devices seems to have drastic effects on the company’s roadmap. Earlier this year it transpired that the company has no plans to update its FX line of high-end desktop microprocessors in 2014 – 2015 timeframe. A new slide from AMD server roadmap indicates that the company has no plans to significantly update its server-class Opteron 4300-/6300-series microprocessors as well.

During a presentation at SC13 conference, Greg Rodgers, principal member of technical staff at AMD Research, was talking about heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) in clusters, reports insideHPC web-site. In addition, he revealed AMD server chip roadmap for 2014 – 2015 timeframe. As expected, AMD will offer Steamroller- and Excavator-based accelerated processing units and central processing units for uniprocessor servers in 2014 (code-named Berlin) and 2015 (code-named Toronto). Besides, the company will also offer ARM-based server solutions in the next couple of years.

What is surprising is that the company is not working on multi-core Steamroller- and Excavator-based multi-core microprocessors for 2-way and 4-way machines. In 2014 and 2015 the company will continue to sell twelve and sixteen cores Opteron 6300-series “Warsaw” processors with Piledriver cores. Essentially, this means that AMD will simply not focus on high-end server microprocessors in the next couple of years.

It is noteworthy that both Berlin and Toronto APUs and CPUs will be fully-fledged system-on-chips and will come with integrated I/O controllers, which will greatly simplify design of uniprocessor servers. Unfortunately, the chips will feature only up to four x86 cores and therefore will not be able to address the market of high-performance servers. AMD’s 2015 APUs and CPUs will get support for DDR4 memory.

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I am however surprised that multi-core server systems are being actively killed off as well.

they are just completely giving up.. and with ARM still not able to do anything significant that unfortunately means intel is king for the next 3+ years if you do any >REAL< work on a workstation and not playing plants vs zombies..

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"During a presentation at SC13 conference, Greg Rodgers, principal member of technical staff at AMD Research, was talking about heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) in clusters, reports insideHPC web-site. In addition, he revealed AMD server chip roadmap for 2014 – 2015 timeframe. As expected, AMD will offer Steamroller- and Excavator-based accelerated processing units and central processing units for uniprocessor servers in 2014 (code-named Berlin) and 2015 (code-named Toronto). Besides, the company will also offer ARM-based server solutions in the next couple of years."

HSA In compute clusters, so X86, or ARM based APUs with integrated GPUs to accelerate computing clusters , and APU based accelerated server chips! So AMD can offer x86 accelerated processing, while also offering ARM based low power server CPUs, for a tiered server based on both ARM and x86, for mixed server workloads, ARM serving web pages, and x86 crunching data analytics workloads. sounds like AMD is looking towards a future of tuned servers optimized for power saving, as well as analytics. With Google and others looking to move to ARM for their server needs, it does not look so bad to be ready for the new market, and ARM based designes will be in the server market! AMD owns SeaMicro, and SeaMicro sells servers with AMD, Intel, or ARM server chips, what ever the customer wants, at a retail markup, of course! SeaMicro, GPUs, APUs, APU based server chips, x86, ARM, sounds like AMD may be around for a while. The Internet of things has been running on the ARM ISA for a few decades, and AMD will be there with ARM ISA based designs of their own. Sure Intel has the most powerful x86, designs, if you can afford the power bill, but the majority of mobile, as well as most of the ubiquitous devices run on the ARM ISA based IP. AMD will be offering affordable x86, and ARM based designs and, let's see how Intel will compete, but in mobile Intel is going to be hurting, and I do not think Intel will ever be able to win but a small fraction of any OEMs mobile product portfolio. Mobile OEMs do not want to experience what Laptop/PC OEMs experienced in the past, by having one company in too much control of the x86 CPU supply chain. IBM did enforce an x86 cross licensing condition on Intel, at the dawn of the PC era, for this very same reason.

So Grandma can get by just fine with an ARM based chromebook for her emails, cat videos, and videos of the grandkids! Schools will have ARM based laptops running chrome, or a full linux distro. AMD's ARM based chips, and some of their low power x86 based chips, will be perfect for this, and running AMD graphics, HSA, uHMA should make these APU really perform!

Look for professional ARM based APU clusters running ARM based server chips and firepro graphics! With more compute workloads offloaded to the GPU via HSA, with many more ARM cores for raytracing, than could be had for just the price of a few Intel x86 cores.

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HSA It is a pure niche tool...Disk i/o operations, excel, pdf's, tcp send receive, Antivirus, Software deployment, data entry, network application acceleration... all unable to be touched by fp64 based registers and gpfpus. floating point math does nothing for integer operation which is 95% of all non-game code. finding pi~ in my network stack is not useful... HSA does nothing here.

look at it this way: why would *i* spend any money on coding for a apu that is less than 3% of the whole market ?

Adobe is not making a HSA version of photoshop, they will use OPENCL
lightwave wont make a special HSA plugin, the will use OPENCL
Office is not going to make a HSA version of powerpoint, they will use OPENCL
won't see hsa enabled pdfs either, OPENCL again
Microsoft is not going to build a special version of direct-x to compete with their own product DIRECT COMPUTE
Hell linux does not even have any *real* ""with a release date"" projected HSA plans.

html5, h265, vp8 wont support it..either again OPENCL..

so .. no, hsa is not a global strategy. it is a gimmick. OPENCL and DirectCompute are already in place.. and have better support and a better adoption rate even across platforms in the case of opencel.. even smartphones from the last 2 years are openCL compliant and some photo apps even use it. but you will not see any amd-hsa phones *EVER* so not useful to them at all.

HSA is niche. and is a life raft for amd... that's it .. and it is a bad one. no-one in their right mind will spend millions of dollars re-writing their software that already works on general x86 and OPENCL to support a tiny sub 10% market that may collapse at any moment because no-one wants to "go first".

this is also the same reason mantle will be a failure when viewed as a whole. "some" people might get some use out of it.. but 90% of the world is not going to use it or spend more money on TWO dev cycles, TWO beta cycles, and TWO patch cycles to support two incompatible rendering engines.

if you only had enough money to build one rendering engine... you build a DX engine and sell to 95% of the market. not the 5% opengl/mantle bs.

and with Caldexa now DEAD and buried, seamicro now x86 only.. arm is also stalling out in anything but a tablet.

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"Reduce Focus" would imply they were actually competitive in the segment to begin with...which they were not. Last I checked, they had < 5% of the server marketshare with 90+% going to Intel and the rest scattered to other companies.

AMD is as good as dead. The only thing they've really got going for them is graphics, and they're *still* losing money as of Q4. So much for consoles saving them.

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A multi-CPU environment allows for pretty high x86 compute density and AMD is giving this up, unless they have an alternative: discrete SOCs based on many small cores in stead of 2-4 giants. The break point between the two solutions is multi-CPU platforms have coherent memory access, while a few many core CPUs tied with freedom fabric are a bit "further" from each other. AMD's bet is on the many core solution w/freedom fabric, be that Jaguar or ARM A57, because nowadays this type of CPU is the only thing they actually have the knowledge to build.

As far as I can see AMD lost their edge in developing x86. They haven't put out a good leap in performance since Hammer, and manufacturing is in tatters. The Alpha team is gone. A Phenom II x6 is their fastest CPU after all these years. They probably don't even have the people to make a good x86 design or even to clone SB. Even if they had manager's support (which they probably don't) I just don't see them innovating on x86 and they may be better off if ARM is the future.

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This story has to be crap. {by the way, the link's busted} An Intel-sponsered site; perhaps it's wishful thinking. Even Rory Read has repeatedly stated the importance of server for AMD; never once mentioned high performance desktop directly by my recollection; but severs yes.And if "Toronto" is Cazerres desktop apu : quad core only? that's nuts; that chip is an 0.02.
This is very concerning, but it just doesn't make rational sense. Happy New Year, everyone.

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Nowhere in this story or the headline is it stated that the desktop CPU's or involved. This is just conjecture by the unwashed masses who fail to read the context. The market for x86 chips is failing due to the jack of an O/S as Win 8 happily runs on an A6 or an Atom so there is no demand for high end desktop CPU's until there is an O/S which needs one.

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AMD and Intel both use technique called chip harvesting. It means having as much of SKUs from as little designs. Desktop chips are always derived from server counterpart. In fact they design server chip then turned off features such as ECC and others to be relabeled as desktop chips.

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Completely backwards. Server chips reuse desktop chip core architecture and then have completely different uncores. Server chips are released about 12 months after the desktop ones for a given process.

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Fanboyism would imply there's some sort of competition going on, which there isn't. No one inside Intel even considers AMD a competitor anymore, and you can't blame them when AMD has publicly announced they aren't competing in the desktop or server markets.

Xbit just seems to have an unusually large population of people who are drinking the AMD koolaid, which I find amusing. AMD's only talent is in the marketing department, not the one that matters.

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Hilarious; AMD is good at marketthing. AMD couldn't market their way out of a wet paperbag with the help of a school of starving Piranha fish who'd all had their teeth sharpened by a mad Kingon warrior. It's the one thing AMD really can't do [and stick to production schedules].And, Mr.Tukee? I think you'll find their head of chip design is one of the most respected and revered engineers on the planet.Sheesh.

By the way: Why the hell is the Warsaw-respin called Opteron 6300? That's the name of their current server products.